Hamnet

seems so simple: one minute ago, four, five, he was here, at her side; now, he is gone. She was with him; she is alone. She feels exposed, chill, peeled like an onion.

She walks back, more slowly, the way she came. How odd it feels, to move along the same streets, the route in reverse, like inking over old words, her feet the quill, going back over work, rewriting, erasing. Partings are strange. It

‘I won’t watch you walk away.’

‘I’ll walk backwards,’ he says, backing away, ‘so I can keep you in my sights.’

‘All the way to London?’

‘If I have to.’

She laughs. ‘You’ll fall into a ditch. You’ll crash into a cart.’

‘So be it.’

house, she is learning, runs very differently from another. Instead of the sprawl of generations, all working together to look after animals and land, the house in Henley Street has a distinct structure: there are the parents, then the sons, then the daughter, then the pigs in the pig-pen and the hens in the henhouse, then the apprentice and then, right at the bottom, the serving maids. Agnes believes her position, as new daughter-in-law, to be ambiguous, somewhere between apprentice and hen.

hemp-woven skeps

She grows up, too, with the memory of what it meant to be properly loved, for what you are, not what you ought to be

She notes that her father loves the new house. He walks around it, with slow, lingering steps, looking up at the chimneys and lintels, shutting and opening each door. If he were a dog, his tail would be constantly wagging.

Joan is never content and she cannot rest if others are. The only thing that pleases her is making others as unhappy as she is. She likes company in her perpetual dissatisfaction. So hide what will make you happy. Make her believe you want its opposite. Then all will be as you wish.

‘If he’s dying, why are you trying to cure him?’

‘I’m not.’ Her eyes flash as she looks at him. ‘But I can ease his passage, take away his pain. Isn’t that what we all deserve, in our final hour?’

The silence swells between them; it expands and wraps itself around them; it acquires shape and form and tendrils, which wave off into the air, like the threads trailing from a broken web.